Hope - Lesley Pearse [128]
Hope looked at the house, the hope that a visit there might lead to something she could be proud of overriding her natural caution. ‘I will,’ she replied. ‘But if he’s rude to me I’ll leave. I’m never going to let anyone speak to me again the way Mrs Toms did today.’
‘She’s a pretty little thing, I’ll grant you that,’ Abel said begrudgingly. ‘But she’s proud, and that won’t go down well with my patients.’
Bennett was with his uncle in the drawing room on the first floor, a gracious room with long, elegant windows, a sparkling chandelier and fine Persian rugs, but the effect was marred by too much furniture. Large, overstuffed armchairs and couches jostled for space between heavily carved and polished chiffoniers, side tables, bookcases and a vast writing desk.
The room reflected sixty-year-old Abel’s appearance, for he was overstuffed too, a short, fat-bellied man with a penchant for floral waistcoats which often vied with his high colour and his checked breeches. Alice, his long-suffering but adoring housekeeper, often tried to persuade him he looked rather more like a circus showman than an eminent doctor, but his explanation for his loud taste was that in nature, the male of the species has the brightest plumage. Bennett privately thought it was a ploy to display his wealth and position.
Harley Place had been built during the Georgian period when the slave trade was booming and wealthy merchants wished to escape the noise and filth of Bristol. Abel had inherited enough money from his ship-owning father to set himself up here with a consulting room on the ground floor, when he was still a young man. Mary, his wife, had been very well connected, so almost as soon as his brass plaque was fixed to the door, her friends flocked to the practice. Sadly, Mary had died in childbirth just five years later, their son stillborn, and Abel had never remarried.
Alice lived in the basement along with the two maids, and although Abel would never admit they were anything more than servants, they had become his substitute family. Bennett often felt Abel was closer to them than he was to his nephew and junior partner.
‘She’ll make a first-class nurse, I’d stake everything on that,’ Bennett said staunchly. He had been somewhat amused that Hope had refused to kowtow to Abel; he was a man who normally intimidated most people at their first meeting.
But Hope had given a good account of herself. She looked him straight in the eye and told him that she could read and write, and she’d been trained in service and was able to cook and sew. She also related explicitly the deaths of her parents from typhus and made it quite clear she understood the need for strict hygiene in the sickroom.
‘If you are such a paragon of virtue, why were you living in a rookery?’ Abel barked at her.
Bennett realized that his uncle suspected she was a prostitute, and expected that Hope would flounder at his loaded question.
‘Because when you have no money you have to take shelter wherever you can,’ she said crisply. ‘But that doesn’t mean I had to fall into the ways of the neighbourhood.’
Abel rang for Alice at that point and asked her to take Hope downstairs while he spoke to Bennett. To his credit, he didn’t embarrass Hope further by giving Alice any orders to see she washed and to find her some clean clothes, but Alice was a very kind-hearted woman and Bennett knew she would do this anyway, even if the girl was asked to leave later.
‘You’ve been bemoaning the absence of good nurses at St Peter’s,’ Abel said as he turned away to pour himself a brandy. ‘So take her there.’
‘I can’t ask her to take that risk,’ Bennett said in horror.
‘She survived nursing her friends,’ Abel said with a shrug. ‘You appear to have avoided being infected too.’
‘I don’t know whether that is just luck or the stringent care I’ve taken to avoid close contact with the victims,’ Bennett said. ‘If it is luck, it could run out.’
He had taken every precaution he could think of to avoid bringing